


For the View

by ArabellaStrange



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: 6000 Years of Pining (Good Omens), 6000 Years of Slow Burn (Good Omens), Angelology, Angst, Author dabbles in theology, Canon Compliant, Crowley Loves Aziraphale (Good Omens), Crowley-centric, Demonology, Drinking, Idiots in Love, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), Love, M/M, Other Angels - Freeform, Repressed through the ages, Retirement, Romance, Slow Burn, South Downs Cottage (Good Omens), Sussex Downs, Touch, also a drama queen, causally as you do, crowley is an idiot, hand holding, they're a pair of drunks and honestly it's 2020. mood.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:27:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26400391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArabellaStrange/pseuds/ArabellaStrange
Summary: Through the ages, here are some of the thing humans have tended to get wrong:• the nature of Heaven (because humans are paranoid)• the nature of Hell (because humans are thick)• the importance of loyalty (because humans are sentimental)• the inevitability of progress (see above)• what's right in front of themCrowley, of course, is a demon. He doesn't get things wrong. He's 99% sure of that.(Or: Crowley spends the course of human history wondering about touch.)
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 30





	For the View

**Author's Note:**

> My friend said write these two idiots as The Dynamic that is obvious to everyone but them. Plus "erotic hand-holding." I don't think this is what she meant, but... oops.
> 
> Title from Wye Oak's "[Fear of Heights](https://youtu.be/V8vL42lanAE)."
> 
> [*and... content warning for mention of Atlantic slavery. Because, well, that happened, but not everyone is in a place to be confronted with it all the time, so just a head's up.]

“I gaze beyond the rain-drenched streets  
To England, where my heart lies

My mind’s distracted and diffused  
My thoughts are many miles away  
They lie with you when you’re asleep  
And kiss you when you start your day

… And so you see, I have come to doubt  
All that I once held as true  
I stand alone without beliefs  
The only truth I know is you

And as I watch the drops of rain  
Weave their weary paths and die  
I know that I am like the rain  
There but for the grace of you go I”  
—from “Kathy’s Song” by Paul Simon

People tended to forget that there had been other angels in the Garden. 

That was people for you. They got two solid millennia of direct, immortal revelations—divine and infernal alike; couldn’t move for the wings flapping about the place, never mind the acts of smiting, blessing, transforming, tempting, inspiring, and the rest. Then they got another two millennia of more subdued intervention (fewer wings; less obvious smiting, blessing, and transforming). And _then_ , if the official Word was to be believed, they got the actual Son of God. Which… well, Crowley wasn’t actually on the inside of that particular choice and its finer theological or metaphysical points, but he was pretty sure that was a _fairly big flag_. So it was really irritating that, somehow, humans continued to cock up the actual handing-down of the announcements and hints and flat-out, literally flashing writing on the wall. Like one, long cosmic game of “telephone” _avant la lettre_.

(And, for that matter, _avant_ the telephone. But that was beside the point.)

Crowley had encountered other angels of various ranks across what one might stretch common sense to call his day —loads of run-of-the-mill messenger Angels, some Thrones (judgy pricks), a few elemental Virtues way back when…

It had been hard _not_ to hear that tosser Raphael, who’d been all smug delivering his message to Adam (and just as smugly, rudely, and downright misogynistically, actually, brushing off most of Eve’s questions). Then there was Michael who, even before the Un-pocalypse, exuded the chilling ozone energy that clung to most of their ilk. They had always been a real terror when it came to squaring off with Satan—who, fine, was the nastiest piece of work himself, but it was a real race to the bottom in terms of which one of that pair had more blood on their hands, and both without blinking a single tear or losing a wink of sleep. (Not that angels, even archangels or fallen ones, needed sleep.) Crowley hadn’t ever met Uriel, but she had that whole “burning bush” thing going on, which—snicker though he might—was frankly as much as Crowley needed to know for how approachable _she_ was. And Gabriel, well. The less said about that bastard the better. 

And that was the point: it seemed, in his not-remotely humble opinion, that people had once again forgotten all the important bits. Or bit.

He forgot it too, at first. 

It was a lot more fun not to think about it. Well, “fun” was absolutely the wrong word, but he didn’t think about that either. He didn't think about anything, if he could help it: didn’t concentrate on his corporation and the way it rebelled when he watched Semyaza and Samaël fall like a shadow over a small, snow-enclosed village in the depths of winter, bringing with themselves stories and song and drink and desire and discord. Crawley (as he was then) hated this place. Everything here came in three colours: stone, wool, or metal. And then there was the seeming everlasting darkness—why anyone had come this far north, he would never understand, when they'd started where it was nice and sunny. It made the citadel at Pandemonium (perennially, infuriatingly under construction though it always was) shine by comparison. But, even bored and freezing, he wasn't particularly keen to see exactly what Samaël was up to, judging by the thick and foetid aura simmering at the westward edge of the village. He was glad for a distraction, anyway, a chance to let up on the tedious temptations he’d been bandying about, and to sit back a bit and wait for a more interesting one.

Instead, he had a front-row seat for a massacre.

A swarm, he would have said, of angels descended to tell the human what to do—as was their wont. The villagers (chiefly the men, because even here, in the dawn of human history, it was clear men were a problem) more or less told the angels to go fuck themselves. Crawley smirked at their audacity, their brash bronze-glinting bravery (“honour,” they would have said) through the long, deep, frigid night of winter in a valley where nothing changed. He stopped smirking when the edge of the woods started to burn.

In the terrible half-dark, half-bonfire blinding brightness, he skulked off as the people of the village ran for weapons, materials, protection, escape. But whatever had been tempted out from the heart of the forest—whether it was unsocial men or wolves or angels or demons or something else—breathed like Pestilence and War together (which, Crawley admitted as he ran, it really might be), radiating outward in waves that had no mercy for anything or anyone.

He ducked around the back of the mead hall just as it burst into flames, managing to grab a burnished metal jug as he went. It was warm in his mouth, in his hands, in his squinting vision. In the midst of the clanging, shrieking skirmish, two humans had also run panting into the embracing shadows to wait for a moment to… he couldn’t tell. The larger, older, female seeming one was gripping a heavy sheering knife in her hand, which was already dipped red. The smaller, thicker, male-sort was likewise crouched behind a heavy woodpile, but his eyes shone with—Crawley’s infernal senses knew between one of the boy’s heartbeats and the next—fierce, mournful rage that made him eager to jump back into the fighting. 

A flash like lightning meant he wasn’t wrong about the angels present.

So easy to shove the boy back into the mêlée—to stoke his bloodlust, set him like a dog upon the other men whose quarrel was rooted in old grievances, liquor-flared tempers, and too many days (Crawley shivered) without proper warmth. 

Just then, the woman glanced over and spied him. She gasped under her breath, but enough for the boy to notice, too. Their baser thoughts ran riot, fear and desperation and anger and violence swirling. She raised her knife.

“Now, now,” Crawley sing-songed, catching them in his thrall before they could think about rushing at him. “We’re not doing any of that.”

They blinked, entranced, but itching beneath his power to shake free. 

“Nope. You’re both far too smart, so you're going to _lisssten_ ,” he murmured to them, though he knew none of this would exist anywhere in their memories except their nightmares. “You’re going to go, towards the next village, and at the next hall you see, or barn, or storehouse, or whatever, you're going to get into it, and you're not going to leave it until the sun is at the top of the sky.” Thin though his grasp (or interest) was on human time, he could at least assume that was a sufficiently long distance from now.

“The sun doesn’t come out at this time of year,” reminded a voice behind him. 

The Guardian of the Eastern Gate was standing just behind him. Theoretically, they should all have been veiled in shadow, but the angel—the worried-looking one from the Garden—was emitting his own soft, snow-coloured light. And not just because he was as pale as anyone Crawley had ever met. 

And, damn. He'd known that—had been complaining about the unshakeable nights often enough. But he didn’t need the angel to know he’d forgotten. Nor what he was up to here. He scarcely knew himself.

“Welcome to the festivities!” Crawley drawled, over the crackling roar of the blazing evergreen trees and the sobbing and yelling of the people on the other side of this half-demolished building. “Flagon of beer?”

“No, thank you,” answered the angel primly. “I think you two should be going,” he added, to the still-frozen pair. “Find somewhere safe but as far from here as you can go, and mind each other. There will be a sign for you when it is time. Run along!” 

They nodded, hearts on their singed and grimy sleeves, then took hold of one another and bolted into the dark.

“Another happy couple sent off into the wild.” Crawley knew he was being a dick—he’d been saying pretty much the same thing, if only because he hated to have his temptations interrupted by the stupid, blunt instrument work by some equally stupid infernal furies. He made sure to shoot a glance of lust into both of the fleeing pair, though he doubted they needed it. Hardship, he’d seen so far, tended to make the humans cling to each other, rather than cleave apart.

“If you had meant them to be involved in…” The angel's eyes flickered guiltily, as though he could neither condone nor name what was still echoing through the hillside. But Crawley had no idea what he was going to say, and the angel picked up without clarifying: "I rather mean, this time, the expulsion would seem to fall squarely on your books.”

“He stole a piece of gold jewellery from the necropolis last week,” Crawley informed the principality, “and she was the biggest slattern in the town. Not exactly scattering the seeds of holiness all the sudden, all right? Give me some credit.”

“Whatever you say,” smiled the angel in self-satisfied amusement. Annoyingly, too, because apparently that was his main mood—that, or hang-wringing uncertainty. Neither of which, come to think of it, was particularly common on an angel.

“Anyway, got to be going. More towns to lay waste to. See you ‘round, angel,” he said, waving a hand over his head as he sauntered off.

“You’re hurt!” exclaimed the angel, abruptly, and he rushed over. 

Crawley must have just stepped into the half-reflected light from the flickering remains of the granary. (Good thing there wouldn’t be much of anyone to need cereals come the morning.) Evidently, slipping out of a burning hall with a metal vessel meant one’s corporeal form was going to be unhappy.

“Ow,” he admitted, flatly, because, all right, yes, now he turned his attention to it, it _hurt_ ; in another instant, it hurt like… well, _worse_. 

“You foolish creature,” tutted the angel, stepping in again and not quite cradling Crawley’s badly injured hand in the air just above his own pristine ones. “You do know these material manifestations can also suffer harm?” 

“It wouldn’t dare.” He winced, but the principality kept moving his hands across and over, in an invisible sphere around his stinging, blistered palm and fingers that didn't ever touch but still felt... something.

“If you’re going to be so cavalier, you really must pay closer attention,” the angel went on.

“What for? If this body really does get too banged up, I’ll just get another one.”

“Mm,” said the angel, frowning. “Do they… I suppose they must manufacture some sort of… forms, down… well.”

“Even you know they do,” Crawley jeered. “Met enough of them at the flood, didn’t you? Bright young things with all the world ahead of them.” They both also knew that none of the beings sculpted in Hell resembled anything like the first Fallen, even in their shared abjection; that these new beings were more purposeful, more perfectly designed to do the unravelling of the world. Very much not to Crawley’s personal taste. Then again, Samaël was of the same original stuff as Crowley, and their daunting, overpowering beauty was the kind that turned small settlements like this one into ash. 

“Of course,” the angel rushed to say, as if in apology. “I simply mean that—well, for example, I am growing quite fond—”

Of what, exactly, Crawley didn’t hear, because in a flash and clap of Grace, another angel appeared. One Crawley didn’t know.

“Aziraphale,” sung the angel, wings aloft behind her as if in flight, though she seemed, at least, to be standing on the earth. “We have to catch up to the healer-woman. She was beginning to turn to Good—”

“I am well aware, Lailah,” sighed the—Aziraphale.

Crawley was almost impressed. He didn’t often get to see a member of the Heavenly Host subtly but unequivocally pull rank.

The newly appeared angel, in casting her eyes off Aziraphale as if hoping to dust off her scorched dignity, spotted him. Her eyes went open and far-reaching, attempting to pin him with her Divine gaze and send him cowering.

“I was just saying to the demon Crawley,” Aziraphale cut in again, more firmly than before, “that he really ought to be leaving the area. Now that we have it under our protection.”

“No much left to protect,” Crawley heckled, but he did so largely for the other one’s (Lailah’s) benefit. “Great work you’re doing, by the way. Really waking the humans’ better side by waiting until the demons have set up shop and then bowling it over only after we’ve got going. Strong stuff.”

Aziraphale’s face was faintly curved into a frown of sad rebuttal, but the taller angel—statuesque and radiantly dark from fingertips to nose to gown, with wings that somehow shaded her further while exuding an occasional ethereal glow on each wing’s upstroke, like the iridescence of an owl in moonlight—ignored him. 

“I will join you at the burial ground,” Lailah announced. With that, she raised an arm, brought it striking down through the air, and _CRACKED_ in disappearance. There were no footprints in the snow.

With a faint sigh, Aziraphale seemed to have a moment of internal conversation, but then lightly shook himself and regarded Crawley again. “I suppose you really ought to be going. I doubt the rest of the party will be any kinder than Lailah to see you… especially not with the fight the other two gave before they were caught. Though I imagine you were with them.”

That was probably good advice: if both Samaël and Semyaza (even a demoted and partly neutered version of him) were currently being... handled by the angels, Crawley wanted nothing to do with it. 

“Not my style,” he insisted. Then he had to quash the voice struggling to say that he didn’t consider the lying with human women, nor the building of terrible weapons in that (literally) damned forge—the source of the auratic stench and the fire tonight, evil in their embers—to be his style either before it left his mouth.

This angel, as he knew from their previous meetings, would also look deeply at you, almost through you. But Aziraphale, unlike his kith and kin, didn’t look in order to overpower, or frighten, or dominate. He simply studied Crawley for a minute. 

“No, I rather think not.” 

It was fine. He could write this up as a win: he was the only one of them walking away, wasn’t he. Even if he was walking away with the weight of an angel’s eyes on his back the entire way.

❧

People tended to over-value the important of loyalty.

That was people for you. Given ample evidence that most human beings would sell each other up the river for a bit of glory or a bag of precious metal, they still went all gooey and useless—or, conversely, sharp and ferocious—when someone they had ever vaguely cared about was up for the axe. The big Axe.

And this was why he’d never told anyone about it. Well, obviously he’d never said anything for lots of reasons. He had a reputation to uphold, for one thing. At least if he ever wanted to put the fear of Hell, or himself, or anybody at all into a human (or plant) ever again. You couldn’t just go around blurting out, “I’ve fancied an angel since the dawn of History, give or take an eon, but anyway, back to the cowering and pleading with you!” and bounce back from that. Besides, they didn’t need to know that demons could be as stupidly swayed as they were.

Once, in Ilion, he’d been very deeply in his cups with some of Paris’s drinking buddies. Nobody had been holding their dignity very near that night, with the walls of the city besieged and the Gods (also known as the Heavenly Host and some bored Princes of Hell) playing a spot of divine chess with the fates of Trojans and Greeks alike. An archer from a town nobody much had heard of and which, after this war, would cease to exist in any meaningful sense, had slumped into a seat beside Crowley, too drunk to stand. 

“S’wrong with you?” he’d slurred at Crowley, unable to keep either eye open for more than a second or two. 

_He would never have done this to you,_ Crowley had heard sound up from the far-reaches of his consciousness. _He’s off in Calah playing with kings and having banquets and petting desert animals, because he can’t bear what his side are doing here. What you’re doing to each other. He’s better than all of them and no one here but me even knows his name._

But he’d known he couldn’t say that. Couldn’t praise an angel and damn himself (for the second time) with his own mouth. Wouldn’t let those words out, even if they were true, even if no one would know what he meant, even if the next day he could blame the wine and the blood; no, not for money nor…

He’d gulped.

“This pretty-boy prince is going to get you all killed,” he’d spat instead, jutting all the angles of his uncoordinated body at the twat currently doubled-over with debauched laughter at the head table. 

It hadn’t been a lie, either. By the next day, that foolish, lonely, lovely kid from a farmtown without a proper name had been gathering flies on the plains.

People also tended to die—one way or another, they all went. Crowley soon perfected the art of leaving well before the pyres went out. That was often when the questions started.

❧

People tended to miss the fundamental style of Hell.

That was people for you. Creatures of extremes, never wanted to do things by halves. And correspondingly couldn’t imagine much in the way of what Hell was actually like—how it worked.

Especially in the early days, that had definitely been the case. Three stonking great pyramids were pretty extreme, even if you went in for a bit of flash now and again; built on the backs of people whose equally extreme earthly torment had had the fringe benefit of making a lot of demons very, very happy to see their own desolation play-acted (as they saw it) on this puny, human scale. The demons had laughed, sent clay-baking heatwaves and heavy, flooding rains, making the days of the enslaved workers into a slow, plodding, agonizing haze that was not in itself back-breaking, not all at once. That wasn’t their way. 

Crowley found himself back in the area some three thousand years later. He blinked, cherishing the chance to bask in the dry desert heat again. It was very much a breath of fresh air, after being Below for the last age or so after an eye-watering audit of his temptations and damnations in which most of his paperwork had been (malevolently, rather than accidentally) waterlogged by a leak in one of the Third Circle storage rooms. This was part of the process, one which he had come to expect: Hell loved making a mess of things, including their own, then punishing you for it. Up here, though, Alexandria was bustling, far busier than most cities Crowley had visited in the last thousand years, give or take. And he liked what the Romans had done with it, for the most part. (The quartering of the city into ethnic districts was a stroke of genius if your aim was to stoke religious unrest which, of course, was the exact aim of the Roman prefect who was currently drinking deep of the fruits of Duke Astaroth’s temptation in a brothel some 40 miles out to the east, on the banks of the Nile.)

It had been a successful but chilly night, and despite being very eager to soak up some of the day’s imminent warmth, Crowley had accustomed his corporeal form to regular sleep. (Slept through several extremely mind-numbing meetings which would absolutely have been more effective on paper, and received a promotion for his rudeness and insubordination.) He seldom appreciated as keenly as now the precise, ironic cruelty of being a cold-blooded creature whose material body craved heat in direct inverse proportion to the sensitivity of his slitted eyes. He was just turning his weary attention to the bleached mud brick establishments where he might acquire a place to curl up in a patch of sunlight, when—

“Crowley!” cried a voice. 

For a second, it looked like the brilliancy of the Delta sun—so thankfully close to rising—had sprung up a bit early as though in punishment for eyes that were still reacclimatizing to the top-side presence of any real light at all. But, squinting, Crowley realized upon further inspection that, no, it was in fact the ethereal radiance of a certain approaching Principality, who was waving a frightfully pale hand in an even more disturbingly cheery fashion.

Crowley glowered against the light.

“My dear Crowley,” greeted Aziraphale warmly, with a smile so charmingly genuine that Crowley was glad he hadn’t yet partaken of any foodstuffs. “What a surprise to find you here, you sly thing. I do hope I’m not interrupting you, mid-… er, well…” He grimaced around the force of his own joy, body doing all sorts of absurd things that seemed to suggest Aziraphale thought that tempting, cursing, or damning involved rather a lot of shimmying of shoulders and whirling of hands.

“Off duty just now,” Crowley assured him. Thankfully the wrist and shoulder movements calmed down at that.

“Oh, lovely. Well, not… but yes, in any event. Lovely. I almost didn’t recognize you, with the shorter hair. But then again, I suppose it has been rather a while since we bumped into one another.”

“‘S a small world, angel,” he pointed out indifferently. At least, he aimed for indifference. 

“Oh, but it’s gotten so big everywhere!” wondered Aziraphale, evidently impervious to even the breeziest indifference and taking everything in his stride. “This city hardly existed at all the last time I saw you in… was it Brundisium? Rome, that second time?”

“Golgotha,” Crowley murmured.

Aziraphale’s good cheer drained, fading into the delicate grace of the early morning around them, as he remembered. “Ah, yes. How right you are.” Even Crowley, who could no longer perceive the feelings going on under the shells of any of the celestial kind, felt the shiver across his skin that accompanied an angel’s sorrow. “A dawn rather like this one, wasn’t it. Beautiful… peaceful, except for…”

Silently, Aziraphale allowed his eyes to wander unseeingly over the early risers as they moved blearily towards prayers, towards work, away from homes whose familiar smell was still trailing in the air. The gentle blue painting everything was slowly easing its hold.

Well that had really fucked the mood, hadn’t it. Crowley squirmed beneath his robes, beneath his skin, and scrambled mentally for anything less morbid to say.

“Good wine in Brundisium,” he threw out. It sounded idiotic even to his own ears.

But Aziraphale, like the luminary equivalent of what Crowley would eventually come himself to invent and call the yo-yo, shone suddenly with the near-blinding glare of before their conversational wobble. “Oh, yes, that wine was exquisite, wasn’t it? Although, I must say, have you tried the new tea they’re serving here? It derives from the most peculiar plant, and then they mix it with honey and _saffron-infused milk_ —delicious.”

He muttered this like a shared secret, pitched low and sweet as, no doubt (judging by his palate) the drink itself would prove to be. 

“Haven’t tried it yet, no,” he said. 

“Perfect! There’s an early morning tea and breaking-the-fast ceremony over the way, there, if you’d like to join me?”

This was the thing humans tended to miss. The gradual, invisible erosion of the ground beneath your feet. The tipping of the scales so incrementally that you didn’t even see the balance shift. Like the sea lapping, wide-mouthed and voracious, at the silt of the shore until the latter had entirely crumbled into its deep. Until it was too late, and there was no going back.

The sun was rising, dauntless and encouraging in the east, promising the kind of clear, well-lit day that inspired strength, bravery, gratitude, meditation, and curiosity of the kind that brought new schools of knowledge into the world.

“Yeah, why not,” Crowley shrugged after a minute.

Daylight broke over the hill as they began to walk, chatting inanely about the humans’ strange predilection for rituals involving beverages.

At one point, Crowley nearly stumbled, having trouble with his depth perception what with all the squinting against the harsh, if welcome sunshine.

“Ah—I nearly forgot!” exclaimed Aziraphale. He reached into his ensemble of cotton and flax, patting himself as though searching for—“Yes, here it is. I happened to meet a very pleasant fellow in Fiesole who was working with some exquisite contraptions. Well, I say working. He will be in a few years’ time.” ( _Once a Principality…_ Crowley intoned inwardly.) “Needed a bit of a boost, you see, but… in any case, this is one of his prototypes.”

He pulled, from another dimension though ostensibly from his linen clothing, a small metal instrument that glinted. It looked expensive, and somehow both fragile and dangerous. 

“Reading stones are all the rage in Rome, of course, but the idea here is that they should be portable,” Aziraphale explained. He lifted the… thing and moved gingerly towards Crowley’s face.

The angel had touched him before, of course, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not. A pat on the knee, a passing of a plate, a tap on the shoulder. None of it ever meant anything—just the kinds of brushes of contact that were bound to happen if you kept running into someone every three or four hundred years down the ages. (Nothing like that in Hell. Touch for those Below was always involuntary, at least for the entity getting touched: the searing fire of a poker; the creeping grasp and humid breath at the back of one’s neck; the jar and jostle of dank, dark corridors of shuffling beings who did not care how much they crowded you.) But the angel _had_ touched him at points in the past, so Crowley shouldn’t have been as startled as he suddenly was by the idea of his newly-sent-out-of-Hell skin meeting Aziraphale’s, by the anticipated sensation of otherwise completely foreign care and damned _consideration_ —

Crowley swerved and leaned back, nearly catching his face on the metal object in the process. “Whoa, watch it, angel. You don’t know how much paperwork I’d have to go through to get a new corporation just because you put out the eyes.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Crowley,” Aziraphale sniffed. He was still holding the contraption delicately in his sainted, blasted hands, aloft between them. “You _wear_ it, like… like a veil. Yes, that’s what it’s like. Well, no, it isn't, but nevermind. May I?”

Empty stomach twisting around nothing more than the dregs of the previous evening’s diluted wine, he frowned heavily. Then nodded.

Fingers brushed the tips of Crowley’s ears, carefully lifting the tendrils of his hair so they wouldn’t be tangled. (It didn’t mean anything. He was just… like that.) Then Aziraphale pushed carefully at the corner of the thing where one arm met the front part, so it slid over his ears in the back and a little higher off his cheekbones. Crowley watched as the thin, translucent cuts of stone rose between him and Aziraphale, whose unconsidered breaths were tingling faintly on Crowley’s skin.

The world was now tinted a thick, almost smoky hue of burnt topaz or murky amber. But… when he focused on looking out _through_ the small, irregular lenses that were suspended (thanks to the lead fixture) on either side of his nose… well, he would have to lie through his teeth to deny that it didn’t work.

“See, you sit these parts atop your ears, there you are…” He stepped back to admire the effect.

“All right, all right, don’t look so pleased with yourself,” Crowley grumbled. But he couldn’t even make it sound convincing. At least the beguiling blue of the angel’s divinely-crafted eyes was now a little less spellbinding.

“You look a bit strange, though, I should tell you,” Aziraphale added, but he was considering Crowley quizzically, as though unsure if the strangeness was a good thing or not. “I wonder if you should wait to use them until there are fewer people about.”

“Not a chance,” Crowley decided definitively. “The fewer, the merrier.”

With a companionable, faux-exasperated sigh, Aziraphale smiled indulgently and began to walk again.

“What can I give you for it?” Crowley asked, sliding along to keep up now that he could so much more easily see where they were going.

“Oh, nothing, of course, it was my pleasure.”

“Then I can’t accept them,” Crowley said, obstinately. He removed the light-guards from where they had, very compliantly, sat firm across his nose (he wouldn’t dare let them slide off), and had to blink even worse at the violent return of the day.

“They’re a gift!” Aziraphale bleated, aghast.

“Can’t go around accepting _gifts_ ,” Crowley pointed out with scorn. 

“Oh, I see,” Aziraphale agreed, nodding, as though this was a different question altogether. Then: “Well then I insist that you pay for the tea. In fact, I insist that you pay for the tea of everyone we meet there, as… as a temptation for gluttony and… sloth!”

He was looking expectantly at this, and Crowley stood still, assessing the angel whom—across the last three thousand years—had been the sole entity ever to offer him anything without a catch.

“I insist,” enunciated Aziraphale again, because he was aware that Hell was indeed keeping tabs on all its parties, albeit it only with half an eye at any given moment.

But even angels, like humans, could miss the infernal forest for the trees. 

“Fine,” Crowley relented, slipping the eye-stones back onto his face. 

The tea, as heralded, was delicious. Sinfully so. And when more than one of the other attendees at the ritual inquired admiringly about Crowley’s new optical fashion, Aziraphale huffed something low about “lust” and “off duty,” and Crowley smirked.

Even demons sometimes failed to notice the undertow until it was too late.

❧

People also, predictably, tended to misunderstand Heaven.

That was people for you. Boot them out of a Garden for breaking rules which, regardless what you thought of them, were at least pretty clear (Do Not Eat—Because.); send a flood, rain down fire and brimstone, turn them to salt, plague them with… well, plagues, and even then? Even then they didn’t fully put the picture together.

“That’s because you have an insider’s perspective, my dear,” Aziraphale said once, over a goblet of the abbey’s back-store wine. In a few centuries, the humans would cultivate these grapes and cross-pollinate them with varietals from the unnamed trees and tresses of the region, until it becomes a rather smooth pour they call a Riesling, which will be one of Aziraphale’s favourites. Too sweet for Crowley’s tongue. He’ll drink it anyway, the same as he was drinking it now.

“Do not,” Crowley sniffed. “They just refuse to pay attention, that lot.”

“Really, Crowley,” Aziraphale chided. “You never met the ones who get their wings and tend their fellows Up There. It’s really very heart-warming to see. And… well, you know how different even some of the angels who work on dreams and inspirations can be from Gabriel and the other soldiers. The humans merely... have yet to appreciate the difference in what we all went through. The horror of it.”

He couldn’t get too close to that idea—of how bruised and torn the Fall had left everyone, a Pyrrhic victory before Pyrrhus himself ever drew breath within clay. “Wishful thinking, angel, and you know it. Paranoid is what they are. Think the walls have eyes and if they can just catch you winking they’ll be able to pull one over on you. Believe me, that’s what’s going through their heads—when it’s anything at all, which is most times.”

“I disagree entirely. They simply cannot fully conceive of the difference between knowing with their… limited vision, as it were, and Knowing. It’s part of what makes their successes so wonderful. We simply look at a thing and Know it. Even if we are unprepared for what we See.”

He paused conspicuously there, and Crowley’s fallen stomach leapt wildly into his throat. 

_You don’t know this,_ he whispered fervently in the privacy of his own mind. A talisman against the very idea, if he could just think it hard enough. 

Obviously, Aziraphale was only a few veils off the Big One—he wasn't as close to all-seeing as the seraphim, of course, but it was the definition of his power and purpose that he could Know just about anything earthly simply by turning his attention to it. There was nowhere for the humans to hide. Not that Heaven cared much. They were content to let the humans sin themselves into oblivion. The rules were clearly stated, then underscored in an eternal chain of fiery commands, long nights of the soul, and reckonings that gave even demons scars. It was a steep, hard, unyielding road back to forgiveness, albeit well sign-posted. 

But demonic beings were, by the very fact of their fallenness, cloaked from that divine Knowledge. If not from Her, surely at least from… 

He had been studying Aziraphale for centuries upon centuries by this point. There was no flicker of cruelty or of (worse) pity in his polar blue eyes. This wasn’t The Discussion. It was just a chat. An extension of the Arrangement.

“If they can’t understand, how is it fair?” he asked, before he could stop himself.

Aziraphale’s expression stumbled, slightly. This was dangerous territory for both of them.

“They just have to try. And to trust that it will all come right in the end.” 

Crowley tilted back even farther in his deerskin chair, perilously perched on its wooden legs. “And what if it doesn’t?” 

He expected to be told off, at the very least, or maybe to be kicked out of the tent altogether. But instead, Aziraphale just smiled gently at him.

“And yet, it will, my dear. You’ll see.”

That hope, that unburnt, unceasing certainty. He wondered, like a flash, whether Aziraphale’s touch felt like that. Warm, soothing, emboldening. Whether, if he could hold tightly enough to that vision and that unshakeable, fierce courage—to that hand he was watching as it lay softly on the table between them—it would weave itself into his own fingertips and his hair and his voice like it shone from Aziraphale’s.

“You changed the subject,” he accused, to get away from that impossible line of thought.

“Did I?” wondered Aziraphale.

“Yes.”

“And what, pray tell, were we discussing, my dear boy?”

“Dinner.”

❧

People tended to believe that progress was, on balance, a pleasant and inevitable thing.

That was people for you. Leave them to lead themselves for a century or ten and what did you have but Hell on Earth?

Crowley could not have been more pleased when Aziraphale’s assignment was narrowed a bit—thanks to population booms, recent inter-human global events (he was hard-pressed to care), and probably just some shitheadedness on Gabriel’s part, since he wasn’t doing much delivering of messages from “early modern” times (ha!) onward. They stuck him in Britain, and occasionally the nearest provinces of… whatever was close to there. Politics, sciences, and the arts, Aziraphale said, as though those things could in any possible way be understood to go together. But it wasn’t the frontlines, at least: Crowley shuddered to hear, from other demons whenever he went Below to hear what was taking place across the Atlantic, at the hands of certain humans (some of them the very politicians and scientists and artists Aziraphale tried, in vain, to inspire) upon the bodies and souls of so many millions more. Seldom any infernal intervention whatsoever was needed. It made the Inquisition look like a somewhat tawdry fancy dress party.

“It’s all rubbish,” he declared one evening, settled into Aziraphale’s favourite coffee house which, miraculously (though not necessarily divinely) was open far later than usual this evening. “What was that—the thing? You know what I mean. ‘Hell is…’” He was not sober enough to remember.

“‘Hell is empty, and all the devils are here,’” Aziraphale finished for him.

“’Sactly,” he seethed. 

He did not then take it for granted, nor had he ever, that when he wasn’t sure what he meant, usually Aziraphale could provide it. Humans thought finishing each other’s sentences was something significant. Try finishing conversations started in the age of the Holy Roman Empire in dialects now silent on the face of the planet, that had been started and continued through more bottles, casks, and barrels of drink than could be counted by mortal minds. Or something. What was he to make of that?

Just now, Aziraphale was swirling a spoon in his tankard of (blessedly mulled) cider. It hadn’t been on the menu before they’d arrived, but Crowley had seen how Aziraphale had been, watched as Aziraphale overheard the news while they stood in a nearby green, to receive the latest reports from Antigua. Small mercies were within their power, both of them, and they’d both spent the better part of the last fifty years bestowing them without restraint. (Even he. Though he would deny it anywhere.) He’d seen the slump to Aziraphale’s shoulders, the shadow come over his eyes. Buffeting the angel’s well-worn allegiances as violently, no doubt, as the ships currently crossing the ocean and making their way into the worst of human history.

He was not drunk enough for this. Neither was Aziraphale.

“Another?” he asked, springing to his feet.

“I shouldn’t,” Aziraphale protested.

“Agh, course you should.” He grabbed for both tankards. 

Just at the last second, Aziraphale wrapped a delicate hand around the tarnished silver handle of his. 

“They don’t deserve it,” Aziraphale whispered, eyes finally meeting Crowley’s—making him realize, with a pang, that it had been hours since they’d really beheld one another. (Not that Crowley hadn’t been looking.)

“They never do, angel.”

He wasn’t even sure he believed that. He had no goodness to safeguard, no rules to obey: he could wish gout, and nightmares, and dread, and ill-fortune, and death upon humans who made even Hell wince.

But he had half a mind to pull Aziraphale to his feet—it wouldn’t be difficult, between the cider, the weight of the day, the chill of the evening, the tangibility of Aziraphale’s distress. Maybe if they got properly drunk, really soused beyond all human reckoning, he could even convince Aziraphale to come back to his. To wring his heart out by the flickering of Crowley’s hearth. Even if they weren’t actually drunk enough, he wondered if they could say they were. Throw themselves into it, finally, as it sometimes seemed they were inevitably meant to do; lock eyes and push away the interdiction (Do Not Touch—Because.) and let it all wash over them until they were inseparable.

“Crowley?” 

He shook his head, focused again on the being in front of him, who looked… lost.

“Another,” he affirmed. 

They drank their way across Temple Bar until the sun came up and sent them both, separately, home.

❧

People tended to be most bothersome at exactly the moment when you most wanted them to fuck off.

“Any snacks for you, sir?” enticed the grimly inobservant concessions person, but Crowley was already snapping his fingers; the man was standing two aisles over, confused, at a pair of humans whom Crowley hoped went home with haemorrhoids and itchy soles of their feet and _"Yellow bloody Submarine"_ stuck in their God-forsaken heads.

Crowley scowled at the track several balconies ahead of him, then scowled a bit harder just in case anyone else in the vicinity had any _thought_ of interrupting him. Upon his arrival, several skittish people had had the good sense to move to other seats when they’d felt the cold, fuming fury cascading off him in waves. That had been happening a lot in the past month.

“ _You go too fast for me, Crowley_ ,” Aziraphale had murmured with discomfort. 

A brush-off. A fucking brush-off. After the better part of six thousand years, and in one fell swoop Aziraphale had decided that all this buddy-buddy stuff, all their late nights and long (very, very long) lunches and matinées at the opera (at _Aziraphale’s_ sodding behest), and even all his absolutely offensively stupid magic tricks, all of which Crowley had sat through; all of which Crowley had humoured, despite being the literal incarnation of impatience, mockery, and disregard for boundaries! All of _this_ and suddenly Aziraphale was an entity of pure, rule-abiding restraint? 

What did he think Crowley had been hanging around for all this time?! What did he think all of his invitations and unconvincing, token protests and soft, warm glances were leading them—leading _Crowley_ , for Go— for Sat— for _his own bloody sake_? Where, if not…

“ _Annnnndddd… they’re off! Number 4 in the lead with an early start, but Number 9 gaining from the outside—_ ”

“Fuck,” snarled a man a row and a few seats down from Crowley. “Come on, you little shit, come _on!_ ”

The man had been steadily losing all day—a grey, dreary one that had drained most of the arena of even its more adventurous punters. All the people who were left radiated the twin signatures of Crowley’s day-trade: hunger, and desperation.

Misery loved company, and all that.

But then a young woman with an unseasonably short skirt as part of what some human who needed no demonic prompting had decided could be called her “uniform” staggered by. Even worse, she was carrying an ungainly tray of popcorn bags and dewy beer cans which was pulling hard on her neck, chafing (sometimes Crowley felt sorry for humans with their awful skin instead of cool, breathable scales). As he glanced sideways, she was trying to edge around the sweary, sweaty, evidently sloshed man to get to another, similarly offensive person another row along, when this man—in his anger, ripping up his ticket for this race, which he’d lost, like all the rest—elbowed her squarely in the side. 

And ooooooovverrrrr went the awful tray, listing and then fully cascading into a pile of sodden popped corn and dented, fizzing cans. 

“No,” she whimpered, smacked sideways (she’d have a bruise—Aziraphale would have caught the thing before it dropped, healed her aching hip where it smacked into the stadium seat in her attempt to right the tray, Hell, healed her neck and probably three other ailments she wasn’t even aware of— _too fast for me_ —STOP), beginning to cry.

“Watch it, you stupid cow,” spat the desperate man, stooping just long enough to pick a can off the floor, flick it open so that the heavy stench of ale foamed up stickily over his fingers, and took a sip, while the young woman was trying to save what she could of her wares.

Crowley got up. Cursed the rest of the day’s races, and tomorrow’s, for good measure. Cursed the weather for the next week and the lavatories for the next year. Then, as he left, he manifested £1000 into the young woman’s coat and wiped her boss’s memory of the irrelevant accident. 

He drove home as fast as he pleased, "Who Wants To Live Forever" blaring unhelpfully the whole way.

❧

People tended to deny what was right in front of them. Often literally.

Which was part of what Agnes Nutter so blasted annoying!

“Enigmatic?! Why does everything have to be so bloody enigmatic? Surely this is the time to be pretty sodding clear, I’d’ve thought! ‘Ye shall be facing Heaven and Hell at exactly 11:09 in the morning, Greenwich Mean Time, and here is a very detailed and successful list of things you should do to avoid being permanently melted down for glue’! Is that so much to ask?!”

“She was writing a prophecy, my dear, not the shipping forecast.”

“Well, more fool her, then,” Crowley snapped. “And more fool us.”

He threw himself, like a Victorian dandy, into the sofa and refused to budge.

“Besides,” Aziraphale added, after an uncomfortable minute of trip-wire silence, “I should imagine that my… my former people would hardly wait until 11 in the morning to arrive. Start the day bright and early, as you mean to go on, and whatnot.”

“Terrific,” Crowley spat. “Would hate to have to wait around all day waiting to be flayed alive and then pulverized into the dandruff on Satan’s own arse.”

“Crowley, really.”

It was so thoroughly familiar a rejoinder—his name and a brief, barbless word of reproach—how many times had he heard exactly that? He could’ve recited along, if he’d been paying more attention. Something in it felt… well, not hopefully exactly. He didn’t have much hope that he would remain to see another night in this flat, another winter, another planet. But it did comfort him. 

His body—no. That wasn’t quite it. His soul had been exhausted by this day. It had been rather an eventful one, even by immortal standards. But by Crowley’s standards, he could hardly recall a harder one. Murdering another demon in his own flat; driving through a wall of fire; losing the Bentley; stopping time; facing Satan with the Antichrist as a pint-sized, semi-human shield; nearly fleeing to the farthest reaches of Alpha Centauri; day-drinking... heavily. 

“Do you think you’d like to sleep?” Aziraphale asked, from where he was settled—perched, really—on a newly conjured, surprisingly stiff-backed chair. 

Crowley looked over at him. Since Tadfield, and really even on the bus journey here, Aziraphale had given off the air of a man inclined to puzzles in the midst of some strongly challenging mental arithmetic. Now, though, some of that absent, calculating whirring had paused in his eyes, which were instead focused on Crowley—focused on Crowley’s crumpled, disregarded form as it schlumped into the abyss of his furniture.

If nothing else, Crowley allowed himself the licence to think, the day had not been completely lost. Yes, the Bentley was gone, the bookshop, any certainty of where they were to go from here— _if_ there was any going anywhere at all, or if the morning was hastening on towards nothing—all of these things had been rather summarily smote. (“Smitten”? That word felt uncomfortable among Crowley’s discombobulated thoughts.) His non-corporeal self mourned the loss of these things, but distantly, like the end of a beloved television programme or rebuff of a friend whom you’d just invited to escape with you to the stars. He could, he had to, live with those things. At least until tomorrow. But he could do so, he knew, because the being currently watching him attentively from across this austere room was, in fact, in it. In being. Incorporated and vibrant and himself. Crowley would (albeit gracelessly, but that was his lot) give a hundred Bentleys, a thousand homey bookshops, an entire infernal brotherhood if it meant that he could spend the time he had remaining in Aziraphale’s presence. Even earlier today, that had seemed impossible. Everything that came after the restoration of that possibility was more of a gift than Crowley knew how to recompense.

“’M fine,” he grunted. “Not drunk enough, but.” He snapped his fingers. The bottle materialized just a split-second after the new coffeetable beneath it did, which made for a satisfying _pop!_ of the cork when they met. He mustered enough energy to pitch forward over his hips, pour out two cups by hand, and extend one rather full one (they were both rather full) to his companion. “And now? Even more fine.”

“Thank you,” Aziraphale answered with customary primness. He glanced into his cup, rather than sip it.

Crowley took several gulps and waited.

“I should… that is,” Aziraphale looked up finally at him, and the sadness was so thick on his face that Crowley felt all the pleasant buzz of the wine evaporate on the spot. “My dear, I don’t want to go any longer without saying” (for the briefest iota of time, all breath in Crowley’s body came to a frozen halt) “how very sorry I am. About what I said today. So many things that I’ve said, in fact, over the years.”

Ah, that was it. Crowley’s throat unclenched a bit—enough for him to take another gulp of wine. “Honestly, angel, I’d already forgotten about it. It’s fine.” (He didn’t need to tell the truth. There were very good reasons, sometimes, why he didn’t.)

“So you’ve said. But, Crowley, tomorrow is… No, please, let me say this. I’m quite sure there’s an answer to this riddle, and that things very well may come out right. But I think it must come after something of a clean slate. A settling of accounts, if you see what I mean. And I am wholly in your debt, my dear, after all the horrible things I said to you lately. Things I didn’t mean, but that I…” He faltered here, perhaps because Crowley was trying to telegraph with every fibre of his demonic and earthly abilities that he really did not need or want to continue this conversation.

“Aziraphale, it was the end of the world today. It’s probably going to happen again tomorrow, especially if we can’t figure out what to do to save our own actual skins. Can we just… leave it?”

“Of course,” Aziraphale caved instantly, “of course, if that’s what you would like.” A beat, then, “But I do apologize, Crowley, from the bottom of—”

“That doesn’t sound like leaving it!” Crowley interrupted, with one thin finger raised from over the top of his now miraculously refilled glass to stop him.

Aziraphale shut up. 

Crowley sighed. Drank some more. Waited until, finally, Aziraphale took a first sip of his own.

“Ah, the Cheval Blanc.” 

“Mm,” Crowley agreed. 

“Do you remember the way René Fourcaud-Laussac dressed for—”

“Ugh, don’t remind me,” Crowley whined, relishing the turn despite the horrible flashbacks. “Red pinstripe waistcoat like a bloody candy-stripper on a cruise! An unqualified disgrace to the history of France, Gaul, the bloody Roman Empire… More money than sense, that bloke. Makes you wish they’d stuck with sumptuary laws just so somebody with _taste_ would prevent him parading around like that.”

“Oh, but those laws were so limiting. The common folk deserved to feel some pleasure and novelty in their dress. Terribly unfair, I thought.”

“This from an angel wearing the same suit since 1897.”

“What?” Aziraphale blinked at him. “What’s wrong with my suit? Don’t you like it?”

“Of course I do,” Crowley reassured him, in a patronizing tone that, to anyone else, would have been utterly unconvincing. 

They kept on, through the bottle and the next, unhurried despite the deepening dark of the sky which could only flow inexorably onwards towards sunrise. Once more, at least. 

Maybe this was where it had been headed all along, Crowley thought, as he laughed loosely at one of Aziraphale’s anecdotes about a mistake he’d watched from another angel (a minor one, new to Earth) in the Middle Ages, who’d been tasked with communicating with an anchoress near York who’d stunned the rookie angel with the, er, extent of her devotion. (Also with the _whiff_ of the very small, very poorly ventilated anchorhold in which she spent her days.) He’d probably heard this story before. He’d heard most of them by now, some more than once. And this was it. This was what it was moving towards all the time, he was growing certain. A partnership, calm and smooth and truly equal. Shared. Crowley hadn’t ever been good at sharing, except with Aziraphale. 

(“ _No, I know what you smell like!_ ” For fuck’s sake, he couldn’t believe he’d actually let himself say that. Several hundred centuries of adversarial sparring, eleven years of close pseudo workplace conspiring, less than a week of imminent apocalypse, and apparently all it took was two seconds of Aziraphale blushing about his new cologne to make Crowley lose every molecule of self-possession. Well, at least this way, he wouldn’t have to answer humiliating questions about it.)

“Are you asleep?” Aziraphale stage-whispered some vague time later, apparently verging on nicely drunk.

“ _No_ ,” Crowley rolled his eyes dramatically. “Course not, ‘a kind’f stupid question is that. M’thinking! You’ve just got it in your hen—in your head that—”

“Oh, do take those horrid things off,” interrupted Aziraphale. He rocked forward, managed to stagger up to where Crowley was lounging nicely, and made a grab for the glasses.

“Oi!” Crowley tried to shoo him back. “Mind the wine and the _face_ , angel!”

“I can’t see your expressions with those dratted things in front of your eyes, you know, and in this propop—propo _s_ terously dark flat, I can hardly see you to start with.”

“I was rolling my eyes. Here, I’m doing it again. See? I can do a running comment’ry.”

Aziraphale rather more sank than sat on the cushion beside him. After a moment of sullen frowning, Aziraphale shook his head. “Hiding behind them all this time. I regret the day I gave them to you.”

If his heart hadn’t already gone through plenty today, more than even a seasoned demon could process at once, he would have felt that keenly. But it had been a long time since he’d first considered that the main feeling he inspired in Aziraphale, in humans, in everyone was regret. At least now it didn’t pack the punch of a surprise. As it was, he simply felt the edges of his smile wilt. “I don’t. First present anyone ever gave me.”

If (another if, a lifetime of ifs) he hadn’t been wearing the shaded glasses, he knew Aziraphale’s piercing look would be devastatingly hard to avoid. Thanks to them, he could take in all of Aziraphale’s silly, nonsensical face up-close. It wasn’t like sitting on park benches or beside each other at the symphony. Here, as in the bookshop (he spared a pang of loss for it again) or sometimes on a quiet night over dinner, he could wonder at the awesome wave of feelings that swept him up whenever he knew that, of all entities in creation, he was very possibly the only one to whom this ridiculous Principality, once Guardian of the Eastern Gate, carrier of a flaming sword he just could not keep a hold of, now not quite on Heaven’s side (at least administratively)… Crowley could wonder, now, how terrifying it was that they had both chosen _their_ side. And chosen it, in truth, so long ago. A thousand thousand days and then more beyond counting. What better way to end one’s unearthly long time in the universe than sitting gazing into the face of his best friend.

“My dear,” Aziraphale breathed with sharp urgency, expression shifting incomprehensively. 

Crowley had no idea what his own face was doing. “What?”

Slowly, with even more tenderness than he had applied when first bestowing spectacles on Crowley’s world-worn eyes, Aziraphale reached up and removed them. Then—to Crowley’s surprise—he stared down… not at where their hands were mere inches away from one another, nor at where their knees were resting familiarly against each other. Either of those things would have caught Crowley’s gaze and trapped it in an endless loop (more ifs, more questions, more remembering). No: Aziraphale was starting into the lenses, at (Crowley could only reason)… his own reflection?

“My dear, I believe I may have just solved that riddle.”

❧

People tended to believe in happy endings.

Or they wanted to believe in them—believe that they existed, that they were possible for anyone. They clung on and came back to that belief in spite of everything. Crowley wondered sometimes if that was the piece he was missing: not that he lacked the desire, but the belief that such things were the destiny of all beings…? He’d seen too much to the contrary. 

(Though sometimes he had to admit, seeing the perverse pleasure and even, what else could he call it, happiness that splashed across one of the other Fallen’s faces upon being able to sit with a fellow demon and scheme, plot, dream, free from any care whatsoever about what they _should_ do, what was _best_ , it was hard to deny that perhaps happy endings looked very, very different through different eyes.)

His own situation underscored this, with bells on.

Aziraphale had found a “charming,” “cosy,” “darling little cottage” in the Downs near the coast. He’d made sure to find one that miraculously (Crowley rolled his eyes) had two storeys and two bedrooms, low ceilings on both floors that cast long, gentle shadows, like the hull of a ship on a calm grey morning. The sea was audible everywhere throughout the house except when Crowley wanted to sleep, at which point he pulled down the blackout blinds (his addition, then tinkered to his satisfaction) and fell into a thoroughly slothful slumber every night in the peace of total silence. The roads nearby frequently went long stretches without a sharp bend, blind turning, or hint of a police car, wandering child, or anyone or anything else that might be a reason to obey any kind of speed limit. There was an offensively large television in one of the main rooms, a wine merchant up the road whose unparalleled inventory verged (to his immense credit) on the dishonest, and a thoroughly wild patch of earth between the house and the downs which had once, he knew without a shadow of a doubt, been a beloved garden.

The plot went back far enough, in the opposite direction to the slow, sloping tumble towards the sea, that it could easily have been mistaken for a very sorely overgrown football pitch. On each side, two respective clusters of hardy, headland trees, wiry and wind-tested and gnarled, stood in quiet guard over the rectangle that was, even without the trees’ help, very clearly bounded on three sides by the wild, indifferent grasses of the downs themselves. But some of the wildflowers had managed to tiptoe over the boundary, springing up here and there with a wild vermilion poppy or pale purple sea aster. If he were going to stay, he’d have tried to find a way to cull the weeds, bring some self-respect back to the cultivated garden plants, but still let the wildflowers—

But he wasn’t staying.

He had thought he could bear it—amiable banter; respectful (fearful) distance; getting used to life without reports and assignments—but he had been wrong. The whole idea had been a bad one. 

At first, he’d even dreamt of… but it didn’t matter. Two bedrooms.

It all had the strange inevitability of a play. (It was a thought he'd had many times before.) And they’d seen enough plays, separately and lately together, over the years for him to recognize the coming-to-the-end bit. The rising action, the big climactic reveal of who the murderer was or how the kingdom would be saved, and then the piecing out of the fates to everyone involved. Things tapered off until at last there were two left on the stage, and only a goodbye left to be said before the drop of the curtain.

“Ready, my dear?” called a voice from the kitchen door. 

“Yeah.” He didn’t look round. It felt like being called to his cue for his final scene. He spent as long of a moment as he could staring daggers at the weeds, wishing them very ill and hoping that, even in his absence, the garden would begin to right itself thanks to a few brief months of stern talking-to. 

Then, when it felt like any longer would be ridiculous, he shoved his hands in his black jeans and marched round the house. He fell into his sauntering, usual countertime with Aziraphale’s familiar melody on their daily walk down to the sands. Aziraphale beamed to see him, apparently unaware of the feeling that was tightening across Crowley’s chest, the prickling at the back of his neck—like they were walking into a trap. Except this time, there was no whiff of evil about the place. At least, nothing he couldn’t attribute to himself.

On the walk, which he barely took in, he listened distantly to Aziraphale, who chatted merrily about the gossip of the town (where he was, unsurprisingly, fully ingratiated already into the painters’ circle, the local retirees’ coastal walking club, the pottery studio, the historical society, and the annual summer festival, which they’d just missed upon moving here in August). 

Before long, the soil beneath their feet gave way to sand and pebbles, and Crowley was smirking in spite of himself.

“Nah, you’re making it too easy for them,” he complained. “They can’t all have sudden, convenient visitations from their ‘muse.’”

“I know, but just think: we could get all of our Christmas presents sorted early this year! I was thinking, if Jane manages to get the glazes under control by November, we could commission something nice in time for Anathema and Newt’s wedding. Of course, I’d much prefer to go with my original idea—”

“Books are not wedding presents, angel, we’ve been over this,” Crowley opined.

“Yes, well. Just as you say, then. And I do think Jane will do much better with the firing next time.”

“Too easy,” Crowley repeated, shaking his head.

The seagulls overhead were enjoying the breeze of the day, despite the chill and occasional dash of rain from the passing clouds, which were—thankfully—keeping most of the tourists off the beach. All of it felt too much like a setting on a postcard; too right, somehow. He could have painted this picture as the beginning to a nightmare for someone else, and he wouldn’t have needed to change a single detail: surf, birds, random nameless people strolling by.

“If you really think so, then I will remind you that _your_ invitation is still very much open. We’d love to have you, my dear. You know as well as I do that stirring things up a bit can help bring out the best in some artists. Adeline, for example: I think another round of sparring with you would help her immensely to figure out her design problem.”

The Adeline in question had nearly bitten off Crowley’s head several weeks prior when he had suggested that her architectural model was not ambitious enough, that her genuine talents were surely more modern than the town planning bores could appreciate, and that she should do what she wanted and to Hell with them. The argument had continued in roaring, enjoyable tones through at least one bottle of wine—the first one he’d shared with the humans here, causing all sorts of raised eyebrows from Aziraphale’s new friends—until he had heard, mid-squabble with Adeline, one of the other undifferentiatable biddies whisper to Aziraphale, “My, my, your other half doesn’t shy away from an argument! Is he this fiery at home?”

He did not know even now how he had managed to extricate himself so quickly from that meeting—whatever Society it was that day—without having to hearing Aziraphale’s reply. It hardly mattered. Whatever he had said, false or true, Crowley couldn’t bear it. Six millennia was high time he learned some self-preservation. 

“We’ll see,” he replied, with no pretence that he had any intention of seeing anything in that direction at all.

The tide was coming in.

Just as would have happened in the dream he painted, a group of children, old enough to think themselves really daring and clever to be out in what (to Crowley at least) felt like the beginning of winter, were taking turns balancing on the wooden groynes along the seafront, doing flips and other dangerous manoeuvres into the waves. He sent along a brutal burst of chilly wind so that they might wait another half hour in trying their shallow-water somersaults, wait at least until the tide fully—

A tickling, tingling sensation in his hand—

—he looked down…

In it, was Aziraphale’s.

He stared.

“Crowley?”

He looked up, still staring, but now into a smile-creased face of blue eyes and salt-clumped, white-blond curls, a face he knew better than any sight in Creation. 

Aziraphale looked him over, calmly, then tugged ever so slightly, which meant that of course Crowley had to step closer. He had no idea what was going on. Their hands were still enclosed around each other.

“Home?” Aziraphale asked. 

This wasn’t part of the script.

Despite being able to account for all his sensory input—the inhale and release of the waves, the laughter of the teenagers along the way, the bleached and softened shell-coloured sky, the tang of salt and (more faintly) tea and frying oil and motor exhaust from the little chippy at the end of the underwhelming stretch called the promenade… he floated. His hand was still in Aziraphale’s. Or Aziraphale’s was in his? It was hard to know, with their fingers gripping surely to each other. In broad, albeit fading, daylight. Right there. On the beach. Where anyone and God could see. 

The size and shape and warmth of Aziraphale’s hand were exactly as he remembered. He’d had no idea that he had remembered until now.

By the time they got back to the house, Crowley had lost and regained feeling in all of his limbs at least twice. The front gate swung invitingly wide for them on what would otherwise have looked to be a breeze; the front door to the house itself unlocked as Aziraphale made his way forward, muttering, “Thank you,” to it, as though Crowley wasn’t already and indelibly _disgustingly fond of an idiot who was polite to doorways_.

Apart from thanking the house for its hospitality, neither of them had said anything for many long minutes. The quiet was probably going to kill him, Crowley decided, if the heart attack radiating up from his palm through his arm to his lungs and blood-pounding ears was anything to go by. 

They didn’t do this. They didn’t allow looks to go on as long as they had lately, didn’t card fingers through each other’s hair before bed when one of them (Crowley) had fallen asleep on the sofa again, didn’t blink blearily (Crowley again) at each other in the mornings without having to say a word to start the day. 

He was going to leave, he needed to leave, he couldn’t keep holding on. He couldn’t let go.

“Tea,” Aziraphale suggested, catching his eye as though to buck up a recently tearful child (infuriating, patronizing, obtuse), but he finally, finally released Crowley’s hand to go make it. And yet Crowley couldn’t help the sound he made any more than he could the twist of his mouth. He wasn’t sure which was the key that gave him away, because Aziraphale came directly back, tea unmade, soothing, “Oh, my dear,” and pulled Crowley in again. Tighter this time. Into a hug.

After a long moment of being tightly, embarrassingly draped over him, Crowley stepped back and looked down, close-up, at Aziraphale’s so-familiar face.

“I don’t know what to do, angel,” he admitted, confessed really, because he’d lost the script some ways back, and he was utterly adrift without it.

“We don’t have to ‘do’ anything,” Aziraphale assured him. “But I rather got the feeling that you… have been wanting to say something. To me. And I suppose I was very curious to learn what it might be.”

Crowley couldn’t be sure he was really hearing this, standing _still very much in the personal space_ , even for them, of the only being he ever needed to be near. He knew the kitchen table was just a few inches behind him, and Aziraphale—illuminated from the reflected light bouncing up from the cool polished floor—was looking at him like… like he would continue to press forward, slowly, a celestial enactment of the walls closing in, until Crowley talked. Like he was very serious about wanting to hear Crowley’s request, whatever it was. He felt like his whole system of defences was crumbling.

“I meant to seduce you!” he blurted out. 

Fucking Hell.

Sodding seven-times damned fucking Hell.

The words dissipated into the air, leaving the echoing thunder of a manifested reality which neither of them could deny. A clusterfuck. An omnishambles. A _real_ apocalypse this time, and no Adam to save him.

He expected Aziraphale to frown, to apologize, to deflate then dismiss then ignore. To wince and turn away. To let him down with sublime, awful gentleness.

Instead, Aziraphale looked glintingly amused at this. “Goodness. That does seem like a welcome scenario.”

“What.”

“I mean to say, I’ve been trying to set us up for the subject for quite some time, so I think it’s a very welcome change that you’ve finally decided to join me.”

“I… Join… What.”

Aziraphale sighed as though put upon, but infused it with so much fondness that Crowley’s entire inner corporeal set-up did a flip.

“And did you have any ideas what you would do after that?”

“ _After?_ ” Crowley croaked, fighting off a hope that was easily 90% nerves and only 10% desperate, Earth-shaking affection.

“I expect so, yes,” Aziraphale nodded faux-seriously. “Obviously I would hardly be able to resist any possible overture you made in that direction. Not after three months of trying to get your attention.”

“Try six thousand years,” Crowley retorted, then heard himself. “I just meant…”

But Aziraphale cut him off with a shake of his head and a sigh. Then, stepping forward once more, into Crowley’s space even farther, he sought out each of Crowley’s still-tingling, uncoordinated hands and interlaced their fingers. (That was not going to help the tingling.)

“My dear, I know I haven’t been—”

Crowley leapt at him. He could see clearly what Aziraphale had been about to say, how it would thread back through their history—the history of the world, and then some—and paint it mournfully. He had no interest in rehashing all that just now.

Instead, he let himself feel how solidly Aziraphale kissed him back, how heart-rendingly good it felt to have Aziraphale’s soft, steady hands rise to cup along the base of his ribs, fingertips just shy of where the scapulars of his wings met his back. He shivered and tried to kiss him harder, though it didn’t seem possible. He chased it.

After several long minutes, he realized that more or less every inch of his corporation was shaking, partly with lack of oxygen and partly at the sounds Aziraphale was making, quiet and breathless. 

He shut his eyes and nudged his forehead into Aziraphale’s, panting.

“We might—” Aziraphale cleared his throat, shaking off the thick rasp that had taken up shop there, and Crowley’s smirk was strong than his nerves, “Hm. We might relocate to somewhere more comfortable. And less vertical.”

“That better not be a line you used on anyone famous, or so help me Satan—”

“Really, Crowley, you were always so jealous of Oscar, and there really is no need—”

“I’m not _jealoussss_ ,” Crowley hissed, in exactly the way every man he’d ever infected with jealousy had always done, “it’s not jealousy if it really happened.”

“Of course it is,” Aziraphale corrected impatiently, reaching up all the time to clasp Crowley’s hands in his from where they’d be hanging for dear life onto Aziraphale’s neck and shoulders. “You don’t imagine that wives who are—” he held his breath for the shortest twist of reality, then released to place them standing in his own bedroom, “—betrayed by their husbands feel any less of the sting when they discover that their husbands really have been unfaithful.”

“Not the same,” Crowley peevishly muttered.

“And yet.” Aziraphale left that hanging, in much the same way his hands now dropped Crowley's in order to ensure they didn’t trip with swaying at the instantaneous move of venues. He moved at least far enough so he wasn't in immediate danger of knocking over the fiddly Victorian table that was uselessly adorning the middle of the room like a very obnoxious puppy. If Crowley hadn't known better, he'd have sworn it was staring at them. 

The air in Aziraphale’s room was different to that in Crowley’s: more the smell of books, and—no doubt because he let it in—the dried aroma of seawater long evaporated. They could have been in the Delta of Alexandria all over again.

He didn’t quite know what to do now. Aziraphale’s mouth was still ruddier than usual; Crowley’s own scarf and jacket were dangling loose (not by his own doing); his tongue still could scent the flavour of Aziraphale’s breath (tea and butterscotch, somehow, and satisfaction).

They stood awkwardly for another moment.

Crowley, for lack of anything better to do, gazed around the room, and caught sight of a bed he’d seen a few times before, and very much in passing.

“You cannot possibly expect us both to fit on that!” Crowley pointed out.

Aziraphale raised an eyebrow at him.

His nerves were rattling like pots being drummed by an energetic, housebound toddler. “You know what I mean. I can’t even believe _you_ sleep there alone! It looks like a child’s bed! There’s no way you’re getting a good…” He trailed off. Then squinted more closely at the angel. “You haven’t slept in it.”

“I did try,” protested Aziraphale, “but it was, well… you know I never found the habit altogether sufficiently… absorbing.”

“Come on,” and then—with more bravery than he really had time to muster—he grabbed Aziraphale’s hand and dragged him from the room. Dragged him, for that matter, to his own room. Kept going into the room until they were standing at the foot of the bed. And then he gestured broadly to it. “Sit.”

“Thank you,” teased Aziraphale, in a voice that said he found Crowley’s manners appalling and his overall self adorable. Crowley’s stomach lurched to think of that honestly for possibly the first time in his long, unbroken existence.

“See? This is what adult-sized humanoid life forms deserve from a bed. A proper bed. That you can actually sleep in.”

Aziraphale cast a suspicious eye over it. “Yes, I see what you mean. It is… rather large enough for several people.” He looked back in feigned innocence at Crowley, who was looming (or attempting to loom) over him. “Are we expecting several more people?”

His voice didn’t squeak, which was luckier than he deserved. “No. Not… not unless you—”

“I must say, Crowley, I had no idea you were the bashful sort. I’m not trying to make you nervous, I promise.”

“Rusty,” he mumbled. 

Aziraphale hadn’t lost his edge of seeming total ease here, which was so fucking annoying and unusual that Crowley was about to climb out of his skin and actually start suggesting they just go to sleep. Or that he should. Wake up tomorrow or a year from now and try again.

But then Aziraphale, somehow both utterly good and profoundly tempting, was reaching for Crowley’s hand again, saying only, devastatingly, “I’m sure,” and this time it was less of a surprise and yet no less thrilling, no less a shiver that he could feel along the curve of his neck and the slope of his otherwise well-coordinated hips, and he got charmed (like a bad joke about being spellbound into a basket) by Aziraphale’s mouth, and then suddenly they were kissing again, but this time _in his bed_. 

He’d known he loved his bed before, but discovering that he could in fact now climb into Aziraphale’s lap, knees digging into the angel’s sides as much as his own heavy-tog duvet, and kiss him to the brink of another reality was a really, really welcome revelation.

Even more welcome was being able to push (well, squirm and bite and pet and then push) Aziraphale enough that he had to lie back, allowing Crowley to crowd him down into the depths of said duvet and continue kissing him—his lips, the dip below his ear, the cord of his shoulder, the soft, supple place with no name that joined Aziraphale’s now-bared chest to his upper arm—again and again and again, with no forethought whatsoever, just the taste of him in his mouth, on his tongue, and all Aziraphale’s gorgeous skin coming alive, impossibly, in the wake of Crowley’s hands.

Somewhere along the way, Aziraphale had started talking again.

“Darling, you—oh, you, _ah_ , fiend—you must let me get some of these terrible clothes off of you as well?”

Crowley grumbled inarticulately, mouth too busy roughing up one of Aziraphale’s nipples, but he was pretty sure that he successfully communicated: _busy_.

“Do you mind if I,” (his voice went a bit breathless again as Crowley’s other hand moved up to mirror his tongue) “gracious, if I…” 

Crowley had to lift his eyes, astonished by the stark, steep angle of their bodies, but Aziraphale had raised a hand with his fingers set to snap with Purpose.

Another jarring lurch to his internal machinery—undefined though it largely was, it managed to leap in unison—at the idea of what that would mean, in a second here… but then that same raised hand was gently thumbing along his left eyebrow, smoothing the hair and tracing the lines of his face, and he had only a momentary lapse where he closed his eyes for strength. Then he nodded.

With an unnecessarily loud _snap_ , Aziraphale miracle away—

Ah, interesting: he opened his eyes to confirm what he knew, from the sudden contact of skin-on-skin, which was that they were now both bared to just their pants (a thoughtful and infuriating compromise). 

“Laugh and I’m gone,” he swore, aiming for vengeful and towering and instead landing more in the neighbourhood of petulant.

“My dear boy, I would never risk that.”

It wasn’t quite what Crowley’s expected him to say. 

“I was going to leave.” He wasn’t sure that was convincing either.

Aziraphale, who made lying underdressed and flat on his back look like this was just another afternoon at the bookshop, nothing to notice here, except the pinking splotches where Crowley had been colouring him, confirmed this suspicion: “Ah, I see. Then you’ll forgive me for failing to see your clever scheme. Perhaps because you packed up your flat after I sold the shop. You installed these frightfully depressing curtains. You had your mail forwarded—”

“You did that!” Crowley insisted.

“—and your most precious pieces of art installed in the sitting room. You have made daily rounds to scare the Dickens out of every plant in a mile radius of the house. And you’ve thoroughly seduced the local wine merchant to the point that he will very soon have the kind of clientele that will allow him to retire early and move to Spain with his family.”

“We can’t _not_ drink, angel.”

With a pursed, pleased mouth, Aziraphale made sure to shrug in a what-can-you-do-I’m-a-simple-soul sort of way, then landed his hands even more distractingly on the tops of Crowley’s thighs where they were bracketing his waist.

“What if this had never happened?” Crowley asked, in sudden, low hesitancy. “What if I cock it up?”

“Darling, I’m sure I’ve told you before.” He was smiling, but he pulled himself more to sitting, which pushed Crowley into his lap. “We are no better than any other part of the universe. We may tend to think we are, but I think we can admit between ourselves that that isn't true. We simply have to… trust. That we are here, that we are made to love one another. That it will last.”

Even with those words ringing in Crowley's ears, Aziraphale's face was so steady, so like his response to every other hopeless question Crowley had ever asked him, returning the grounding, rooted power of deep and abiding hope. A leap in the dark, the humans called it sometimes.

Crowley couldn’t win against that. He didn’t want to.

So instead he snapped his own fingers.

Things got rather unseemly after that. There was a lot of pushing and somebody begging and he had hoped (and fantasized, for so long now) that he would be the train driver on this particular journey and he would therefore get to decide who (as it very much were) got off first and when, but—as with the rest of this upside-down day—he found himself plastered against Aziraphale, moving only as Aziraphale’s hands and murmured directions and encouragement bade him move, whining and wordless.

Which meant that he was panting and still blinking spots out of his vision by the time Aziraphale curled against him and made a mess the likes of which his poor beloved duvet would never forgive him. 

It wasn’t going to be happy ever again, he thought wickedly. 

He let Aziraphale, himself also still regaining his breath, pull him in close as they calmed.

“Thank goodness we don’t have any neighbours.” Aziraphale sighed contentedly.

“'ha’ d’you mean?” slurred Crowley automatically.

“Only that you were a tad… Well I certainly don’t want to discourage it, so perhaps it’s not importa—”

“I’m too blassssted tired, angel,” he pointed out. “Tell me later.”

“Yes,” Aziraphale agreed, a little too readily, but Crowley really was too far into his post-coital nap to do anything about it.

He woke a little while later to a sea of warm yellows and a dark cloud. 

He blinked.

The duvet (miraculously, no doubt, clean) was now pulled up to his shoulders—which were, he was intrigued to realize, still bare. Half of his vision had been obscured by the top of the stormy grey of the covers where he’d more or less disappeared under them.

But then, coming fully awake, he realized that the golden glow was in fact the bedside glow of a lamp—which had not been there when he’d gone to sleep—reflecting off an open book and two solid hands absently gripping either page.

He pulled his forehead back enough to see that he’d been plastered against the heat of Aziraphale’s (sadly, shirt-wrapped) hip. The bed, it turned out, was plenty big enough for both of them—he had acres of space between his back and the cliff that marked the edge of the bed. Not that, in sleep, his body had been interested in any of it. He'd never allowed any bed of his to age into the form of his body: they stayed in mint condition until he left town or wanted to try the latest in human spring innovation. But he lay there, trying to think of what it meant—if he could ever possibly get used to—waking up like this. In a bed that, if Crowley unwound his expectations a little, might someday have the impressions of two beings rather than one.

“Awake?” Aziraphale was propped against his (Crowley’s) headboard, with his fuddy-duddy "reading spectacles” and a cup of tea. (He always said it as though with careful scare-quotes, despite having more or less invented the damn things.) But then he gazed down at Crowley’s uncovered eyes, sending a jolt through him that was at once familiar and totally, freshly overpowering. _Almost vertiginous_ —he could hardly take it; like looking up at the sun and yet like standing on a precipice and looking down at wide, open air. He shut his eyes and burrowed closer into Aziraphale’s hip. 

“No,” he revelled. He couldn’t even be sure. Then, groggily, he added, “Anyone burn down the house?”

“Manifestly not. And, thankfully, we have also not been visited by any sudden lightning storms, stereophonic apparitions, or smouldering correspondence. Unless you had any bad dreams?”

“Nope. Wings still working? Sea still un-boiled?”

“My dear, of the pair of us, _you_ were the one who was certain we didn't have to spend this time constantly looking over our shoulders!”

“It was a joke, angel.” Half a joke, anyway. He was going to have to do a bit of very surreptitious screening of their post and speaker-systems for the next month or so: taking an angel to bed (or, honestly, being taken by said angel, in his own bed no less) was, in his newly informed opinion, no less significant than the near end of the world. And a demon didn't survive this long without being wary of any good thing that came too easily.

Aziraphale “Hmm”ed in a voice that somehow perfectly communicated _many-a-true-word-spoken-in-jest_ , enough to make Crowley wonder dimly if they could now read each other's thoughts.

Maybe one time wasn't quite enough to merit notice by Above or Below. But now that he knew, had the smallest glimpse of what he'd been missing this last several thousand years, he had ideas. Vivid, decidedly un-angelic ideas. Ideas that might translate to _plans_ that might (if they went better than most of his plans to date) get them at least a sternly worded memo. One he would take great pleasure in setting immediately on fire. Or using as compost.

He was just settling in to imagine the various ways he could destroy any possible message from their old offices, when Aziraphale stilled beside him and interrupted his thoughts.

“You weren't asleep very long, you know. If it would be easier to do without... Well, I mean, would you like me to—”

“ _No._ ” 

He shot a hand out beneath the covers and gripped what he found first—the top of Aziraphale’s slightly hairy shin and the incline of his kneecap. (Evidently the shirt didn't reach that far. Good to know. Maybe Aziraphale had some ideas, too.) He held on tightly, a bit too tightly for comfort, but it was as much as he could do—for every word he had trouble forming his mouth around, every beautiful thing Aziraphale had said to him but which caught in his own throat, rougher and edge-prone, hungry and (all right, fine) jealous and unaccustomed to being given free rein to say what he'd locked up and avoided for... well, since the Beginning. But he was starting to believe that he would, eventually, get there.

After another tense moment, an answering hand landed on the top of Crowley’s head, Aziraphale’s thumb gently tracing circles into his scalp.

At some point, the sound of the sea lulled him back to sleep. 

Tomorrow he would need to start on the garden.

XX

**Author's Note:**

> My [bookmarks for GO fics](https://archiveofourown.org/bookmarks?utf8=%E2%9C%93&commit=Sort+and+Filter&bookmark_search%5Bsort_column%5D=created_at&include_bookmark_search%5Brelationship_ids%5D%5B%5D=575567&bookmark_search%5Bother_tag_names%5D=&bookmark_search%5Bother_bookmark_tag_names%5D=&bookmark_search%5Bexcluded_tag_names%5D=&bookmark_search%5Bexcluded_bookmark_tag_names%5D=&bookmark_search%5Bbookmarkable_query%5D=&bookmark_search%5Bbookmark_query%5D=&bookmark_search%5Blanguage_id%5D=&bookmark_search%5Brec%5D=0&bookmark_search%5Bwith_notes%5D=0&user_id=ArabellaStrange) are pretty much also a bibliography of inspirations. Especially all the other through-the-ages fics (like "[you knew my name on sight](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19044874)" by brinnanza and "[You, Soft and Only](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19874908)" by thehoyden; and then even more generally but fundamentally, ["Crown of Thorns/The Wall, The Wainscot, and the Mouse"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/728117) by irisbleufic—from which my headcanon about Uriel, Raphael, and the rest of their life on the Downs comes. (Honestly, if you're reading this instead of that, I hope it's only because you've read it so many times that you just need to try something else for variety's sake.) But this fic diverges from parts of that, and from the other great pieces on Crowley and Aziraphale in general, so I didn't tag them as directly "inspired by."
> 
> And yes, all right, I've used that epigraph before. It's too good. Blame Paul Simon.


End file.
